Ainsworth Pet Nutrition

Location

Ainsworth Pet Nutrition is a fifth generation family-owned and operated company named after one of the company’s founders, George Ainsworth Lang. The company is focused entirely on pets, catering to all segments of the pet food industry.

Ainsworth Pet Nutrition has three business units including DAD’S Pet Care, Ainsworth Specialty Brands and Ainsworth Custom. The company makes a wide spectrum of pet foods and snacks from brands that offer sound nutrition and convenience to ultra-premium specialty foods.

Ainsworth Pet Nutrition is committed to food safety and manufactures all of its pet food in the United States using whole grains and quality meats that can be traced throughout the entire food chain.

Environmental Commitment

2011 was our most successful year to-date for our company-wide Social & Eco Responsibility program (started in late-2009). We made significant achievements across our entire company and established longer-term 2015 goals for Logistics, Packaging, Manufacturing, Products, & Community.

Some significant highlights:

Manufacturing achieved a recycling rate of over 90% for our largest facility (it’s 1 of 2), while reducing the waste we intrinsically create by 66% (it went from 6% ‘waste created’ to 2% — all in 2011). In sum, we are recycling more than ever and creating less waste than ever. This is on-top of our 2015 goals that we set (in 2011) which aim to reduce carbon emissions by 15%; water-usage by 25%; achieve a 99% recycle-rate; & create less than 1% created waste.

Packaging reduced the amount of packaging materials utilized by 7%, while incorporating only bio-degradable materials with how everything is wrapped & shipped. Logistics took 100,000 ‘road-miles’ out of the shipping process (with a 2015 goal of 1,000,000) & saved 20,000 gallons of fuel by purchasing these simple cab-heater engines (see website below for details). We are also moving our forklift fleet entirely over to electric-based motors (we got about half-way there in 2011).

For products, we began purchasing carbon offsets (fully offsetting the emissions we create while producing/selling/shipping the brand) for one of our high-end brands, Back to Basics, on top of over $2.5M (seriously, that much) to-date of social donations through our most successful pet food brand — Rachael Ray Nutrish. 2012 will see carbon offsets extended into the Rachael Ray Nutrish brand as well.

We created a Community Team who planted over 100 trees on our water-front backyard land, which we donated to a local conservancy (to be part of the larger ‘Ernst Trail’). We also expanded a local ‘French-Creek Clean-Up’ initiative to include local corporations. This helped expand the event by over 200 people & resulted in over 23,000 total-pounds of trash being removed from the creek.

We also made extension plans for 2012, where we will be growing the program into sourcing, which aims to look down our supply chain into the agricultural process, looking to see how we can pick certain suppliers based on their environmental actions, local-ness, or socially-responsible behavior.

In sum, it was a huge year for us and the biggest we’ve had by far, with significant achievements of which we are very proud of. In addition, each of the various components have 2015 goals set, so all this momentum will only be continued.